snippet-start

Use snippet tags to mark exactly which lines Shnippet should grab from your test files. The extractor scans your files, finds these tags, normalizes indentation, preserves the content within the tags, and writes it to .snippet.txt files.

Default tags

By default, Shnippet looks for the following markers:

:snippet-start: <name>
:snippet-end:

Example (TypeScript test):

describe('Math functions', () => {
  it('adds', () => {
    // :snippet-start: add
    const result = add(2, 3);
    // result is 5
    // :snippet-end:
    expect(result).toBe(5);
  });
});

• Everything between :snippet-start: add and :snippet-end: becomes the snippet named add.
• Comments inside the region are preserved in the generated snippet.

Customizing the tags

You can customize the start and end markers in your config. In Docusaurus (docs site), we use docs/shnippet.config.js (CommonJS):

module.exports = {
  // ...other options
  snippetTags: {
    start: ':snippet-start:',
    end: ':snippet-end:',
    prependStart: ':prepend-start:',
    prependEnd: ':prepend-end:',
  },
};

Change start and end if you prefer different markers, e.g.:

snippetTags: {
  start: ':anything:',
  end: ':you-want:',
  prependStart: ':start-imports:',
  prependEnd: ':end-imports:',
}

Note

I highly recommend using colons to start and end your strings because I haven't tested if they work otherwise :D

The extractor will then use those custom strings instead of the defaults.

Where the output goes

Output location depends on your config. In the docs site, we write to static/snippets, then fetch from /snippets/<ext>/<name>.snippet.txt at runtime (extension-derived keys like ts, js).

module.exports = {
  // ...
  snippetOutputDirectory: './static/snippets',
  outputDirectoryStructure: 'byLanguage',
};

Tips

• Keep snippet regions minimal—only the lines you want to show.
• Name snippets uniquely per language (Shnippet generates SnippetName types from discovered names).
• If you customize tag strings, make sure they don’t appear elsewhere in your code accidentally.